9781422286814

Spirit of a Nation: The People of Mexico

destroyed when the peasants revolted. Others wonder if outsiders may have invaded it. San Lorenzo is famous for its many ancient stone monuments. The most famous of these are the Olmec heads. The huge stone heads have large eyes and mouths, and their headgear appears to be that of warriors or perhaps rulers. Some people have even suggested that their hats look like the helmets of football players. If this hypothesis is true, then the stone heads may have been monuments to Olmec athletes. The Olmec stone heads stand as tall as eight and a half feet tall. One stone head can weigh as much as 44 tons. These heads were carved without the use of metal tools! The Olmecs made fine pottery and jade jewelry as well. They carved figurines to represent their half-human, half-jaguar deity . The human-jaguar was an extremely important symbol in the Olmec culture. The Olmecs may have

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believed they were themselves descended from jaguars, and their religious leaders clearly held the jaguar in high regard. The Olmecs may have worshiped the human- jaguar as a combination fertility and rain god. They carved images of human-jaguars into their altar-like thrones. They also made masks in the image of the human-jaguar’s face. In Olmec artwork, human-jaguars look very young, more like chubby babies than adults. They were often given toothless

The Olmecs have been called the “Rubber People” or the “People from the Land of Rubber.” This is because they lived in an area that is known to produce a great deal of rubber. Several rubber balls were discovered at the Olmec site of El Manatí, near San Lorenzo. Archeologists believe that ball courts and rubber ball games were an important part of Olmec culture.